Frank Kogan

My brother, Richard, writes:

Stepping up to the challenge...

As you know, Nan and I read science fiction, murder mysteries, and other relatively light fiction and popular scientific non-fiction to each other for relaxation and entertainment, and have for decades. So eventually, when we got through all the Asimov and Heinlein and Kuttner and Wyndham and Christie and Sayers and Allingham and ..., we turned to other authors. My distaste for brutality and meanness as a form of relaxation and entertainment kept me away from most of the American noir classics (Nan is more fascinated with brutality than I). I really prefer a Joan Hess mystery, which features irony and a touch of romance mixed in with multiple corpses.

Anyway, in our travels we read through a number of "The Cat Who..." mysteries by Lillian Jackson Braun (there are other authors who play off this theme as well, but she seems preeminent in the field, or perhaps I should say the litter box).

What's my take? A) These are probably no better and no worse than many of the hundreds of unboiled mysteries written by American women. B) In the three or four books of hers we read, the cat is relatively incidental - perhaps it sniffs out a corpse or is found sleeping on a clue, but it is otherwise not featured. Rather, the books feature a supposedly normal person with a normal job, who just happens to be around when corpses turn up and through coincidence, ingenuity, or whatever ends up solving the mystery - in short, the standard fare.

I conclude that in these books, the cat really plays the role of Bella Abzug's hats or Sen. Paul Simon's bow tie or Sherlock Holmes' cocaine habit or Miss Marple's knitting. The cats are there as some sort of symbolic reference [I'm not exactly sure what they are symbolic of], but play very little role in the plot or theme. In short, the cat does little or nothing to enhance from or detract from the books. As for the books themselves: merely average, as is evidenced by the fact that even though we are always looking for something new to read, we dropped this author after reading a few. Don't waste your time.

In a literal sense, these books are not exactly appropriate for the use to which they are being put in your column. But if you assume that none of your readers has read any of them (a reasonable assumption, I would think - on the surface they are the pure antithesis of a punk sensibility), then they serve the rhetorical purpose of your columns admirably.

The fact that Nan and I both prefer the Ramones to the cat mysteries BUT SAMPLED BOTH suggests that one can never be exactly sure which dances anyone will investigate.

(Rita Mae Brown also writes mysteries that feature cats, though she writes other stuff too and has a tonier rep than Lilian Jackson Braun, or anyway sometimes she's considered literature. I've never read any of her books, though I've watched her former gf play tennis.)